Tag Archives: Jodi Lynn Anderson

Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy, he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair. . . .

Fifteen-year-old Tiger Lily doesn’t believe in love stories or happy endings. Then she meets the alluring teenage Peter Pan in the forbidden woods of Neverland and immediately falls under his spell.

Peter is unlike anyone she’s ever known. Impetuous and brave, he both scares and enthralls her. As the leader of the Lost Boys, the most fearsome of Neverland’s inhabitants, Peter is an unthinkable match for Tiger Lily. Soon, she is risking everything—her family, her future—to be with him. When she is faced with marriage to a terrible man in her own tribe, she must choose between the life she’s always known and running away to an uncertain future with Peter.

With enemies threatening to tear them apart, the lovers seem doomed. But it’s the arrival of Wendy Darling, an English girl who’s everything Tiger Lily is not, that leads Tiger Lily to discover that the most dangerous enemies can live inside even the most loyal and loving heart.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Peaches comes a magical and bewitching story of the romance between a fearless heroine and the boy who wouldn’t grow up.

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When I was in elementary, we used to have these character books, where we write the names of all the characters of the cartoon shows we watch, and we match them with the people in our class. I almost never get the “lead roles” because there’s always someone else for them, even in my own notebook (but I don’t put myself in the lead roles there because as a rule, everyone can read that notebook, and I didn’t want to be thought of as conceitedor something), so I usually I put myself in the secondary roles — the ones that still matter, but not really the star of the show. So for the pages based on the Peter Pan anime that we all grew up with, I am usually Tiger Lily.

I’ve seen Tiger Lilyby Jodi Lynn Anderson in other blogs for a long time now, but I’m not that much of a fan of Peter Pan and its retellings, so I didn’t really care for it. I’ve heard good things about it, though, but I didn’t think it would be my thing, you know? Then I ran into it again, while I was looking for other books to read in my Kindle, when the books I was currently reading weren’t doing just what I want for me. But I was kind of wary, too, especially since I knew this was a love story, and not a happy one at that. We all know that, right? I mean, Peter Pan is with Wendy, and even Tinkerbell knows that. But what happened before Wendy arrived in Neverland? Did Peter ever belong to someone else?

Jodi Lynn Anderson’s Tiger Lily explored that. We meet fifteen year old Tiger Lily, a loner among her Sky Eaters tribe. She’s often quiet and usually fierce, and most people in her tribe are afraid of her, save for her adopted father, Tik Tok, a small guy named Pine Sap, another girl named Moon Eye and finally, the little fairy who started following her, Tinkerbell. We follow Tiger Lily’s story through Tinkerbell’s eyes, with how she saved a man, and how she was set for marriage, and how meets Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Soon, quiet Tiger Lily is entranced by the childish yet charismatic Peter, and she starts sneaking out just to be with him. But when she is called to do her duty for her family and her tribe, she must make a choice. With the pirates looming around the boys and someone trying to change the way her tribe works, Tiger Lily is dealing with a lot, but it’s Wendy Darling who ends up threatening her the most.

Oh, my heart. I knew this isn’t a happy story, I really did. But I didn’t expect how much this will make me sigh and kind of wreck havoc over my heart. :( Tiger Lilyheld me captive, and I couldn’t stop reading it when I started. A lot of what the readability had to do with the writing — there was simple yet beautiful prose in the story, and it perfectly fits the almost somber and whimsical mood of the story. The quotes I included below are a proof of that. It’s like the author chose her words very carefully, so it would really sound like how Tinkerbell would see it, and say it.

If you’re a purist for Peter Pan’s stories though, you might get a little disappointed with how there were some things lacking in Anderson’s depiction of Neverland. Save for the fairies, there’s no magic. Neverland is a place that is somewhere in the Atlantic, and not “Second star to the right and straight on till morning”. The boys don’t fly, and Tinkerbell doesn’t spread fairy dust so they can think happy thoughts. There were some seemingly magical elements, but they weren’t blatant, and they’re still sort of believable and I didn’t mind it. It made the story a little easier to get into (except that I kept on expecting the boys to fly. Heh).

The story isn’t fluff, though. Tiger Lily is also quite brutal in some scenes, and the complicated relationships add to this brutality. But can a book this brutal be beautiful, too? I think so, I really do. Because oh, my heart. My heart broke so much for Tiger Lily and Peter, and how their story has been doomed for the start. Knowing that it was doomed didn’t make me want to stop reading, because I wanted to know how it all played out. Maybe I was wishing it wouldn’t end the way I was already expecting it. Or maybe, I just want to see how it ends, because it couldn’t possibly have an absolutely ugly ending, right?

I’m pretty sure it was the latter, because when I got to the end, I sighed. My heart sighed, several times, and Tiger Lily left me with a little ache there — it hurt, but it was also beautiful, and I know that I couldn’t ask for anything more.

I’m glad I read Tiger Lily by Jodi Lynn Anderson now. I think I read it at the right time, just as when I needed something like this. Oh, my heart.

Number of dog-eared pages: 40

Favorite dog-eared quote(s):

There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret. (p.18)

I liked the way they stood together. They both kept one ear on each other, and one on the forest around them. And yet, there was something almost peaceful about them standing there. Maybe the way he seemed to vibrate made her stillness seem less glaring, and Peter seemed calmer. (p.62)

A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime. (p.76)

She was fierce, to be sure, but she had a girl’s heart, after all. As she walked home that night, she was shaking from the largeness of it. I didn’t know why she seemed so sad and happy at the same time. To love someone was not what she had expected. It was like falling from somewhere high up and breaking in half, and only one person having the secret to the puzzle of putting her back together. (p.119)

Sometimes, I think that maybe we are just stories. Like we may be words on a page, because we’re only what we’ve done and what we are going to do. (p.193)

Every kind of love, it seems, is the only one. It doesn’t happen twice. And I never expected that you could have a broken heart and love with it too, so much that it doesn’t seem broken at all. (p.199)